Where I look at online art

There’s a whole lot of art out there in t’internet. It’s never been easier as an artist to get your work out to a larger audience; not only is it easy to get your work online but there is so much sharing and re-sharing who knows how it will end up. It’s also very easy for the lover of visual things to see stuff to excite and inspire..so today’s post is a roundup of some of my favourites

Personally, I’m a big fan of Pinterest for finding new art to look at; lots of art of different kinds appear in front of me and I can follow up on it or not depending on how it engages me…also it’s a bit Darwinian in that it tends to be the art which is exciting, interesting or engaging which gets shared about which means that most of what I get to see is really rather good, and also because it either shows me stuff from people who have similar tastes in art who have boards I’ve followed, or suggestions based on what else I’ve picked.

The big player in online art is Deviant Art, and there is lots and lots of good stuff there to see. But quite often I find that I’m not seeing it because there is almost too much art being added all the time! According to the entry on Wikipedia DA receives 140,000 new submissions every day; that’s a hell of a lot of art! For me that’s an almost unworkable amount of art! I can’t look at a fraction of that number daily even if I had the time so to do; I’d get image overload. I do find lots of things on DA which I really like, and generally I make a point of following the artists so I can see more of their stuff…in fact it’s essential for me to do that in order to manage my experience. Where DA really scores is the number of people who selflessly produce stock images, photoshop brushes, textures and other things for other creative people to use in exchange quite often for nothing more than an acknowledgement.

Another site where people publish their own work which I like is Behance, there is much less content than on DA and it’s aimed more at graphic design than fine art- the fact that it’s based on creative portfolios makes it a different sort of thing, and the standard is very high and very professional; in fact a lot of people who put their art there are professional designers. Lots of eye-catching things to see. I also like the website of the Depthcore collective and I’m a daily viewer of Creative Bloq, Dezeen and This is Colossal all of which have great art and design content added daily. Recently I’ve also started using Flipboard and Stumbleupon to see a range of art and design content from around the web.

That’s my own list, there are loads more places out there to see art online – what are your favourites?